REVIEW: David Blaine at Sands Bethlehem Event Center is like the punk rock of stage magic

David Blaine is to magic what punk rock is to music.

While other stage magicians continue to create bloated spectacles to try to capture crowds, Blaine takes great, basic elements of the origins of legerdemain and presents them in a stripped-down way that makes them viscerallly exciting again.

The 44-year-old, still very much the Brooklyn street magician he once was, had little on stage besides himself and a large screen behind him to project images of the close-up magic he was doing when he stopped Friday at Sands Bethlehem Event Center.

The show was part of his first-ever live tour after 20 years of largely television magic.

A disembodied voice introduced his show as “the spectacle of the real,” and that was an apt description of much of what Blaine did during his hour and 45 minutes on stage (plus an intermission and a supporting act between sets).

And he drank two quarts of water before filling his mouth with kerosene and blowing it into a flame to start a prop on fire as a side-show fire-breather would, then regurgitated the water to extinguish it. Making the effect even more believable, he even had to swallow and regurgitate an additional amount to finish.

The effects certainly could have been tricks, but with the available closeness of observation, they certainly seemed real, and certainly were in the arena of believability – if very difficult and dangerous.

He also swallowed the wedding ring of an audience volunteer and, before recovering it as a sword swallower would with a straightened coat hanger, also “retrieved” a tiny live frog before pulling the ring out wrapped inside the hanger.

Again, the blurred line between what was real and what were tricks made the show even better – and more believable.

There were other tricks. He had a woman from the audience retrieve a single puzzle piece from a box of 2,000 and brought out a map to show it fit a space that corresponded with Bethlehem in an unfinished puzzle of the United States.

He had a man and woman close their eyes and, similar to a Voodoo doll, caused the man to respond when he touched the woman.

The show’s second act was for Blaine to submerge himself into a huge, transparent tank of water and – after breathing oxygen from a facemask for several seconds -- hold his breath for more than 10 minutes. He even let several audience members come on stage to observe him in the tank up close.

For such a simplistic and stationary act, it prompted the audience to strongly buy in. The crowd cheered him along as it watched the time tick away, then gave Blaine a lusty response when he finally emerged. Again, it was far more a feat or endurance than a standard magic trick, but it was very effective.

During a 15-minute audience question-and-answer period as he composed himself after the breath-holding stunt, Blaine said his idea for the tour was to give the audience as many of his stunts as possible.

“I wanted to see how many things I could do back-to-back in front of you guys,” he said.

He said the show is evolving, and expects it to change. “It’s experimental,” he said. “Anything can happen/ I don’t know where it’s going to go, but you’re seeing it at the beginning.”

He said his breath-holding stunts, which he would previously do perhaps a year apart (Blaine once held the world record for holding his breath at more than 17 minutes, but it was broken) requires recuperation time. “I could stop and it never happen again, ‘cause it’s physically a monster,” he said.

To close the show, Blaine brought an 11-year-old budding magician on stage to help him with a card trick. He had another audience member choose part of a torn card, then had the boy reveal the other half.

But to set up that trick, Blaine performed another feat – ripping in half the full deck of cards.

It’s an old trick, but a good one – and one to which Blaine again gave life. Sort of like what punks do with original rock ‘n’ roll.